The Antibody Society

the official website of the antibody society

An international non-profit supporting antibody-related research and development.

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Computational Antibody Discovery Symposium now On Demand

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Did you miss the Computational Antibody Discovery Symposium held on June 22?

On Demand videos are now available on YouTube!

  1. Introduction by Janice Reichert (The Antibody Society); Konrad Krawczyk (Natural Antibody); Andrew Buchanan (AstraZeneca), and
    the first speaker: Pietro Sormanni (University of Cambridge). Third-generation approaches of antibody discovery and optimization
  2. Tzvika Hartman (Biolojic Design). AI-driven design of smart therapeutics
  3. Sandeep Kumar (Boehringer Ingelheim). Biopharmaceutical Informatics: Syncretic use of computation and experimentation in discovery and development of biotherapeutics
  4. Ben Holland (Antiverse). Machine learning-based design of antibodies against difficult targets
  5. Panel discussion summary: Panelists provided their opinions and insights on these questions:
    What properties are more urgent to be able to design in silico – binding specificity, developability or something else?
    What performance should computational antibody design achieve to improve upon established protocols?
    What are the biggest hurdles for computational antibody discovery to achieve its full potential (models, data or something else)?
    How could industry and academia complement each other to solve the problem of computationally designing antibodies?
    What role does big tech/biopharma have to play in development and adoption of computational antibody design paradigms?
  6. Concluding remarks (Andrew Buchanan, AstraZeneca)

The complete playlist is here.

Please note: Victor Greiff presented unpublished material; posting of the video of his talk will be delayed. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive an alert when new videos are added.

Thank you for your interest in the Symposium. We hope the videos inspire useful discussions in the future.

The Society thanks our retiring Directors

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The first annual meeting of The Antibody Society’s Board of Directors was held on December 2, 2007. Following their retirement on July 6, 2022, we are recognizing the outstanding contributions of four founding members: Dr. Andrew Bradbury, Prof. Dennis Burton,  Prof. Andreas Plückthun and Prof. Jamie Scott. In addition, we are acknowledging the strong contributions of Dr. Greg Adams who became a Director in 2013 and also retired on July 6th. Dr. Bradbury served as our first, and Prof. Scott as our second President. As stated by Dr. Bradbury: “the Society aimed to provide a forum and voice for the thousands of people working in this area and to help attract and encourage young students to all facets of the field”.  Amongst other things, this initially was done by ensuring the excellent scientific content of the Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics conference. Since that time, the Society has grown into a mature and world-renowned non-profit trade organization with ~ 2400 members from academia, government agencies and industry, and financially supported by over 40 companies ranging from the smallest biotech companies to the largest pharma firms.

The Society thanks Drs Bradbury and Adams and Profs Burton, Plückthun and Scott for their dedication and service, which has enabled the Society to grow and thrive. Each retiring member was given a special award for outstanding contributions to the Society, in the form of a piece of art which was specifically commissioned for them.

More information about The Antibody Society’s Board of Directors can be found here.

Thanks to all who participated in Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics Europe!

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Another very successful Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics Europe has concluded!

The Antibody Society thanks all the volunteers who helped at the booth:

 

  • Demelza Willemsz (Genmab)
  • Thomas Wesselink (Genmab)
  • Chalana Zilvold – van den Oever (Genmab)
  • Charlotte Berendsen (Genmab)
  • Lisa King (Amsterdam UMC)
  • Milon de Jong (Amsterdam UMC)

In addition to Thomas, Milon and Lisa, Kerry Chester (Board of Directors member), Janine Schuurman (Society Vice President) and Sally Ward (Society President) appear in the image above.

We hope to see you in Amsterdam in June 2023 for the next Antibody Engineering & Therapeutics Europe.

The 2022 Science Writing Competition is open!

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Attention Student & Post-doc members:
The 2022 Science Writing Competition is open!

Clear, concise communication is essential to make your science accessible. The Antibody Society is offering you a chance to grow this skill through a Science Writing Competition. For examples, view winning essays from the 2021 Science Writing Competition.

We invite you to submit an essay of 1200 – 1500 words on a topic related to antibody research. Feel free to use an eye-catching self-generated high-resolution graphic (jpg format) to help make your main point. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

Antibody engineering
Antibody therapeutics
Fc effector function and neutralization
Bispecific antibodies
Antibody-drug conjugates
Adaptive immune receptor repertoires

The winning essays are featured on The Antibody Society’s website and winners receive a $400 cash prize.

Two winners (1 student, 1 post-doc) will be selected by our panel of judges based on the originality, creativity, clarity, and structure of their essays.

Send your essay to membership@antibodysociety.org as a Word document. The first 30 submissions will be considered for the competition. Please include your contact details and whether you are a student or post-doc in your email.

Submission deadline: May 1, 2022
Essays should be written for a general reader. Guidance on effective scientific writing can be found here and here.

Entry is limited to The Antibody Society student and post-doc members. Additional information can be found here.

Not a member? Membership is free for students and post-docs – register here!

Season’s Greetings

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As the end of the year draws nears, we would like to thank our members, sponsors, partners, and many volunteers for their participation and contributions. With this help, we had a very productive year. In particular, we co-organized two Symposia in 2021, and launched our Career Shorts interviews and webinar series on Antibody Discovery & Development, Commercializing Antibody Therapeutics, and Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoires.

In case you missed either Symposia, recordings from our Emerging Immunotherapeutics for Ovarian Cancer Symposium (co-organized with the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance) and Emerging Cancer Therapies Leveraging Gamma-Delta Effector T cells Symposium (co-organized with LAVA Therapeutics) are available On Demand on our YouTube channel.

The Career Shorts interviews are also available on our YouTube channel. In this series, scientists and individuals working within the world of antibodies discuss the experiences that have shaped their careers. In sharing their experiences and advice, we aim to empower the next generation of scientists and leaders working in this field to make confident and informed decisions. Career Shorts is the creation of an exceptionally talented volunteer, Raquel Barroso Ferro.

We hope you will join us in our activities in 2022. In particular, The Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) Community of The Antibody Society will hold their 6th meeting during May 16-19, 2022. The “Exploring New Frontiers” meeting will be held in person in La Jolla, CA. The AIRR Community is a research-driven group that is organizing and coordinating stakeholders in the use of next-generation sequencing technologies to study antibody/B-cell and T-cell receptor repertoires.

Our volunteer experts in antibody engineering, Drs. Alicia Chenoweth and Silvia Crescioli, will apply their formidable knowledge of this area to create a searchable table of antibody therapeutics in late-stage clinical studies that will appear online in Q1 2022. Their very useful searchable table of antibody therapeutics that are approved or in review in the European Union or United States is already online.

In addition, we are planning a Symposium on Biopharmaceutical Informatics, tentatively scheduled for September 2022, and we will start a new Graduate Student/Post-doc Research Competition. When available, details for these new programs will be posted on our website and sent via email to members.

Our best wishes to you and yours for a wonderful holiday and a happy new year in 2022!